Pre-emptive Worship

The first time I went to church at In the Light Ministries, I did the dougie. For me, doing the dougie in church = dream come true. Technically though, they called it the “douglass.” And technically, it was at a young adult event called Cross Culture, which is aimed towards getting young adults involved in cross-cultural worship through their artistic talents such as singing, dancing, and spoken word poetry. Part of the service involved participants volunteering their definitions of worship, which included the idea that worship focuses on the way we live our lives daily, and that worship centers on Spirit and truth. God used In the Light Ministries to begin showing me many facets of worship. 

One of my best friends at home told me that when she thought about Heaven, she thought about us hanging out and doing the same types of things that we do now, but just completely basking in God’s presence in every way possible, and with a full knowledge of God. I was thinking about what she said one day while a bunch of us Sidewalkers were hanging out in the living room, and I had one of those spiffy moments where I thought, “Hey, hey, I can’t wait to be doing this in Heaven with all of these people!” But then I thought, hold up, eternity includes life right now!

This kind of shift in thinking has been a theme for me during Sidewalks. My tendency is to focus a lot on how awesome it is that we can spend forever with God, and getting as many people to get the chance to know God personally as possible. This summer God’s been opening my eyes more to the fact that he’s doing his redemptive and restorative work right now, and that what we do to partner with him today is actually a huge part of what it means to be living in the fullness of the gospel.  

God’s been calling me to worship him, right here and now in a lot of new ways this summer. Our community has practiced replacing the “I” and “me” words in our worship songs with “we” and “us” in order to focus on what God is doing in us as a whole. He’s called us to lament, as seen in Kacy’s blog post last week. This week at Water Street Ministries we prayer-walked around the ministry campus a few times, both lamenting and calling out to God in pre-emptive worship for what he will do, which is a something we saw in Isaiah 61:11: “For as the earth brings forth its shoots, and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations.”

 

Sidewalks has already been a huge gift to me in so many ways. Interning at Water Street Health Services, a free health clinic for those under the 200% poverty level, has been AMAZING and the community we’re all living in together is so refreshing. It feels like every day I get a little bit more of a glimpse into what it means to know Jesus and worship him here.  I’ve also noticed God calling me into a quiet worship this summer, continually reminding me to spend time with him, and to rest on the Sabbath. Whether it’s doing the dougie in Church, listening to the patient’s stories at Water Street Health Services, or just enjoying community, God is breaking into my life and my team members’ lives daily here. I can’t wait to see what he does for the next couple of weeks. Cue pre-emptive worship.